Video Essentials DVD

Video Essentials was designed to document the transition from the composite video of our NTSC system and laserdisc to the component video of DVD. The program itself was produced in the component video domain, as was A Video Standard before it, and then converted to the highest possible quality composite video that could be put on laserdisc. By the way composite video on laserdisc had the potential of being much better than what was being broadcast at the time. JKP played an active part of making that happen when A Video Standard was released in 1989.

The program was assembled in the early part of 1996 with the first laserdisc version released in June of that year. The Japanese version of the laserdisc was released in December. Reformatting it for DVD, even though it was produced in the component domain, proved to be difficult. We were after many of the, topic search, stop frame and step frame capabilities found in the laserdisc. Getting there required months of effort on the part of several facilities working in the new media of DVD. Our original goal was to be one of the first DVD’s on the market. Instead we were a topic of conversation at a plug fest trying to debug issues with DVD authoring. VE finally came out on DVD in October 1997, about seven months after the formal start date of the format in the consumer market. We never got to an easy to use menu system in this program. As a result you’ll find a document on how to navigate the disc.

Easy to use navigation and menu systems seemed to elude us as we were often among the first to try lots of interactivity in the menu system of each new format.